131563-lets-talk-about-population-exiles-vs-dominions-page-5
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5 Content Voxine and I are already in one | |} ---- Organics, no class. I'm spoken for. | |} ---- Spoken for you say... Why was this information not disclosed to me? That's good. Edited October 9, 2015 by Mental Surge | |} ---- Aurin are like the elves of WoW. Blood Elves got added because before them population imbalance absurdly favored Alliance and this was mostly Night Elves. After Blood Elves the factions were mostly balanced but all those census addons tend to claim Horde ranges from 60-80% Blood Elf, server depending... And blood elf players tend to be severely lore ignorant because they got their Aryan hero race (at least at BC launch, their lore had that kind of a theme to it - but people did and still do mostly ignored all the talking NPCs spouting a hybrid of "WWII Axis" and "Orwellian 1984" comments) and so play it as good, insist they are good, but its actual lore... Makes them the most evil thing in the WoW universe. Sure by the end of the BC expac the Blood Elves got a lore revamp that removed "some" of their evil, but it took a while to remove their unique ability to devour souls (mana tap was gone as an ability before its lore reason of eating souls was 'solved'). People choose for looks, and will ignore even blatant trolling them over their choice as WoW devs did with comically evil lore for the "pretty" option. To solve the Wildstar problem, you'd need something even more overthetop cute than cat/bunny girls... or just copy them Dominion side but make them bustier and curvier and remove the defunct male option... because... that works. You could them make them even more evil than the Strain and they'd still dominate the rosters... Edited October 9, 2015 by Kichwas | |} ---- ---- Agreed. As a result of factions, we have the effective result of two MMOs that are half the size that they could be... but share the same name. And eat into each other's resources (two MMOs on each server, so... queues). They've dug themselves into a lore hole on this one though. Lore wise the only faction that can win is the Dominion. You have a galactic empire versus... some refugees on a 200 year old broken down space ship and some small vessels on the side. And Lore wise, while the Dominion does a mix of good and bad, its intentions towards two of the Exile races are outright genocidal (Aurin and Mordesh). Diplomacy could solve this for the Aurin on terms NOT acceptable to any player that likes the Aurin for anything more than "I haz bunnygirl". And much as we make fun of Aurin players, players who chose it for its lore actually do exist in big enough numbers for this to be an issue. Diplomacy could not resolve the Mordesh issue - a cure could, and that would essentially result in them being a race that was halfway between the Vulcans and the Romulans... which is not a good place to be in terms of dramatic potential. You really can't merge these factions as the lore exists... and if they pay too much attention to their background lore - the Exiles would be dead because the Dominion should have a galactic fleet showing up any day now (other space ships are coming and going - all the neutrals for example, so the Dominion should be able to get a few hundred thousand arkships here now that its on the map). ... So we should merge them, for the sake of the game. But for the story... we're in a bit of a logical pickle. All of the logical resolutions are extremely unappealing to the playerbase. Even Dominion players would lose out lore wise if the fleet that should be here, was here. So we're already ignoring that bit of lore... But a merger would be a shark jumping level of ignoring lore because unlike ignoring the galactic fleet... this would happen to a live game and not in the background... Somebody should have really stopped them BEFORE this got too far, and told them to just make a story about 'the people of the galaxy have found the planet of the ancient progenitors, and you have have decided to go or been tasked with going there and kicking butt.' | |} ---- I think it's more the case that the Exiles are the "good guys" and Dominion the "bad". This seems to be especially true of PVE servers, you'll find most gravitate towards being the good guys whereas on PVP servers you'll get a better mix. Edited October 9, 2015 by H3rboss | |} ---- The Dominion, to me, is a re-creation of the stupidity, arrogance, and brutality of organized religion from real life history. Organized religion to me is the most "bad" it can get in my opinion (others may disagree but this is how I see things). I would never play Dominion after doing the starter instance in beta. The Players I met that play Dominion are fine, it's the lore of the Dominion that bothers me, and in a MMO or an RPG or almost any game with back story the lore can make or break a game for me. I wouldn't play Dominion even if someone paid me to do it. If Carbine merged the two factions I would quit the game. Sure many Players would benefit from merged factions, but I would leave, and I wager a bet at least a few others would as well. Question is would the gain balance out the losses. Edited October 10, 2015 by Gardavil | |} ---- ---- ---- There's a simple solution for the lore, though. Spoilers abound, slightly... We're told early on that the Eldan's Nexus Project will have a profound effect on the cosmos, but it was completed long before the players arrive on the planet, and presumably no-one even noticed anything had changed in the greater galaxy when it did. So whatever else the Eldan did with their project, besides the events you uncover in the main storyline, that particular goal wasn't complete. So let's say that a hitherto unknown last step after the project was complete to point we encounter it, was a complete reformat of the rest of the universe outside of the Nexus system. Some future drop unlocks a conspiracy between NPCS/rogue player factions/the Entity etc. that completes the step to everyone's horror. This has two effects: 1. No galaxy-wide empire to crush the Exiles. The only things still living are the relatively balanced (in lore) Exile and Dominion forces currently in the Nexus system, Nexus lifeforms etc.; and 2. the ongoing natural evolution of the Great Format opens up new star systems/locations for future expansions. You could set up some nice tension, too, by having the main Dominion fleet juuust about to arrive but not quite make it as the format goes off. Which acknoledges your point nicely while eliminating it as a threat in one stroke. It's not a perfect solution, since I gave it just ten minutes of thought while I was writing the thing out, but it does solve your major dilemma rather handily. Probably won't ever happen though, unless I've somehow managed to channel whoever at Carbine wrote the main story and the future direction (or they read this and immediately scrap their plans, hailing me as a narrative genius and offering me a 6-figure job to use my brilliant ideas... but I can dream...) | |} ---- ---- ---- Yeah the unfortunate effect of them ONLY ever focusing on Exiles every single trailer. Do the Hyrcrest quests on Dominion side, and you'll see the Exiles are pretty evil themselves. Developing plagues and spreading disease amongst the farmers and livestock so everyone dies a slow agonizing death. Really peachy the Exiles are. | |} ---- In regards to PvE - when a game has a decent population on both factions there is no need. PvE is more about the story as well. Merc mode got implemented because over 90% of the PvP population in WoW - legitimately confirmed by various tracking websites - rerolled Alliance at the start of the expansion. Instead of actually doing anything to promote people to transfer back Horde they just let them queue on the opposite factions to fix the wait times...in non-rated play. (Which actually made it worse for Horde players - so I quit.) I'm already seeing the signs of this damage in Wildstar with Dominion being "the" faction for PvP and premades being so hard to find on Exiles - outside guilds; which means anybody who wants to PvE on the side somewhat seriously or play with their friends are screwed. Edited October 10, 2015 by Shirt | |} ---- ---- Well - It is a possibility. The game appears to be doing well right now outside new players and PvP. (BG forums are filled with a singular complaint right now.) | |} ---- We ain't out of the hole we dug ourselves yet. With recent changes to runes and that, we might be digging a little bit deeper. | |} ---- ---- Oh good. So we're still nowhere near an expansion though. But on the bright side, at least Blade and Soul is almost here! | |} ---- ---- I really doubt we are at risk of losing too many players to a badly animated (*) softcore porn game. If we were, Second Life would have killed WoW a decade ago... (*) The walk cycle for females in that game has so much twerking going on if a real life woman tried to do it she'd snap her spinal chord... | |} ---- True, but at least BnS hasn't mucked up too much since launch. OT: No hopes for an expansion now. Wait until we can see how healthy the game is. | |} ---- Some easier steps would be 1. Finish Mechari. Give them actual voices, like we hear in the cinematics, and shoes that always work. 2. Give Chua more stereotypically female customization options to go with all their stereotypically male options (like beards and mustaches). It's fine for Chua to have secret genders as long as the race has as many customization options as a race with two clear genders, and those options have as many feminine as masculine options. 3. Let all races be all classes. If someone want to play a certain class but their first choice of race doesn't offer it and their second choice race happens to be Exile... I mean, right off the bat, if one faction is being shorted on races and customization many people will choose the other. Less easy options, 1. Introduce some playable Nexus race(s) that can be on either faction. I'm not saying Lopp, but... | |} ---- Remains to be seen. | |} ---- ---- This would just make things worse. We joke that there are two factions: Dominion and Aurin. This change would make that a near actual situation. It would make faction imbalance worse than it was before F2P, and it would make the Exile faction monolithic. I'm reminded of what happened when they added warrior to blood elf in WoW... its after that that some servers ended up being 80% elf... and Nazi Elves are not even close to as popular of a concept as catgirls and bunnygirls. Right now Dominion might be somewhere between 20% to 30% of the playerbase - and its still busy because the game is very active. Do something to dip it under 10% and we'll have critical issues... This one I agree with. Why does 'we can't their gender' have to be so overwhelmingly male looking, and then... you can color it pink. Seriously... (so I made mine brown). Edited October 11, 2015 by Kichwas | |} ---- ---- ---- | |} ---- ---- There are quests on Exile side too but they are a bit more subtle. In Galeras there is a quest where your Exile toon goes into an NPC Dominion base and you poison/tamper with some medical supplies. Thats bad because 1) they would be harming Dominion wounded 2) they could also be harming Exile wounded. In Levian Bay there is a Dominion Doctor treating an Exile prisoner. She gets punished for it later on but its still a sign that in the WS universe they *do* give medical attention to prisoners though not as often as you would see in IRL war situations. | |} ---- ---- ---- ----